Bob Guccione, Jr. on Staying Ahead of the Trends

Guccione: I’m not sure I do, personally, anymore. Certainly, pop culture [is down] because it’s no longer organic for me. So the real answer is to those people who are wondering if their instincts are right, if they’re organic, they’re probably right. If they Google Analytics, they’re probably wrong. Google, by definition, is only analyzing what has happened. You can, maybe, infer what might happen, but I always trust human instincts over analytics. I have instincts about other things in life within pop culture. I think I see trends and I’m pursuing personally business ventures in those trends. I’m looking right through this recession. I’m saying, I’m not bothered by that. This is not a depression. We’re not going to have, you know, 30 and 40% unemployment. We’re not going to have the people walking by wheelbarrows of dollars like they did in Germany in the Weimar Republic, you know. So I think this recession is temporal, it will pass, and those trends will come back up, you know, and that’s where I’ll go. I think the real number one answer has to be it has to be organic. You have to feel it. You have to be passionate about it. I don’t get involved in a lot of things that I’m neither [shown or offered] because I’m not passionate about it. I have no instinctual feel for it and no real desire. So I think it’s better to stay away from those things. I probably miss good business opportunities that way, but, ultimately, I’ll do better with the things I feel passionate about.

Even the optimists among us would have to admit 2018 was a challenging year. The fractured world that became the focus of our 2018 Annual Meeting a year ago came under further pressure from populist rhetoric and rising nationalist agendas. At the same time, the urgent need for coordinated global action in areas such as climate change, inequality and the impact of automation on jobs became more intense.